The Fan Who Caught Two of Yankee Stadium’s Last Homers

In the New York Yankees’ final homestand at Yankee Stadium last week, baseball collector Zack Hample caught two home run balls on successive nights — the seventh- and eighth-last homers by Yankees in the ballpark that has housed the team for 85 years.

Zack Hample with some of his baseballs in 1999.

YES Network broadcaster Michael Kay was taken aback when he realized that the same man caught both Jason Giambi’s home run last Tuesday and Johnny Damon’s homer the next night. “The odds have to be astronomical that that would happen — to catch two in a season, let alone two on back-to-back nights,” Kay said.

But Hample’s feat was more the product of determination and specialized skills than of dumb luck.

Hample, whose Web site chronicles his history of catching baseballs at games, had caught four home-run balls in about 200 prior games at Yankee Stadium, he told me. That means the probability of his catching a home-run ball at any given game was about one in 50, so his chances for consecutive games were more like one in 2,500. The chances it would happen at some point in those 200 games is more like one in 100, though there is admittedly something special about doing it in the stadium’s final week.

Yet even these basic calculations underestimate the probability of the feat, for two reasons: Hample, age 31, has refined his technique over the years; and until recently he didn’t even try for home-run balls. While his Web site touts his career total of balls snagged at major-league games — up to 3,794 through Tuesday night’s game at Shea Stadium — just 123 came during games, and 115 of those were on foul balls. The rest came mostly in batting practice. “I kind of feel like I wasted all those years going for foul balls,” Hample said. “I have friends who are collectors who have dozens of home runs. Some of them have hundreds.” He added, “I’m almost embarrassed to admit that only seven of them have been home runs.” (The other was a ground-rule double.)

Outtakes

More tidbits from Hample:

•A native New Yorker, he caught his first ball at age 12. He lives in Manhattan and grew up a Mets fan, but now roots more for players than teams.

•”I’ve given away a lot of balls to kids,” he said — about a ball per game. This usually happens after batting practice, once he’s identified those children who tried hard to catch a ball but failed.

•The rest of the balls sit in his childhood bedroom, at his parents’ apartment six blocks from his own. “It’s a room they don’t use now, except occasionally when they have overnight guests,” Hample said, “and guests just have to deal with the balls.” Whenever his parents threaten to chuck them, he points out that TV crews may want to film him with his collection. He never takes the balls out of the apartment for a game of catch.

•His in-season livelihood is his baseball books and his service in which, for a fee, he’ll let people watch games with him and get tips on snagging balls and other ballgame essentials such as worthwhile stadium fare. Off-season, he works in his parents’ Manhattan bookstore.

•On his wish list: four foul balls in one game; an Alex Rodriguez home run; a World Series home run; two homers in the same game; and 30 total balls in one game, including batting practice. But he won’t hang up his glove even if he reaches all those goals. “If I’m going to go to game, I’m going to bring my glove, and if I’m going to bring my glove, I’m going to go early to batting practice.”

After he set his sights on homers, he found that the old Yankee Stadium is particularly kind to home-run-ball seekers — or was, now that the Yankees have been eliminated from the playoffs and will play their next home game in the new Yankee Stadium next spring. He snagged six of his seven homers there. (The seventh was Barry Bonds’s 724th career home run, at San Diego’s Petco Park.)

“You need to have a stadium that provides for lateral movement,” Hample said. And in the Yankee Stadium bleachers, a wheelchair aisle just behind the railing provided that for him last week. He detailed his prime seating on his blog for eachof last week’s games. “I was working all angles to try to hang out in the wheelchair aisle,” he said.

That doesn’t mean either catch was easy. For the second one, hit by Johnny Damon, he pushed his frame against the railing, and talked about his snag afterwards in words usually used by sportsmen rather sports collectors. “We do what we have to do,” Hample said. “The ball lasts forever but the pain definitely goes away.”

So do Yankee Stadium and the Mets’ Shea Stadium — and Hample won’t miss Shea when the two stadiums are replaced next year. “It is a terrible, terrible stadium for game home runs,” he said, noting the paucity of outfield seating, with much of what’s available reserved for large groups.

He’s not sure yet how the New York teams’ new homes will compare. “I don’t think they’re going to be great,” Hample said. “I really can’t tell anything until I’m there.” He talks about stadium layout like frequent fliers discussing planes: “Is there 14 inches of space between rows or 16 inches? Are the pockets on my pants going to get caught on cupholders?”

Though his two home-run catches were caught on film, many of Hample’s claims aren’t authenticated. “How do I prove I didn’t buy these balls and claim that I caught them?” he asked rhetorically. There are authenticators at every game to document home-run balls, but they don’t document batting-practice balls, he said. “If anybody ever doubted me, they could go to one game and watch me in action,” he said.

Further reading: Wyoming state representative Steve Harshman says he caught the final home run hit at Yankee Stadium. According to Associated Content, one man caught two home run balls at Yankee Stadium last season. The report’s claim that the odds against this feat were 1 in 743,216,644 is highly questionable. Hample shared ball-catching tips with Newsday’s Neil Best. I estimated the probability of two fans in adjacent seats catching consecutive foul balls at a game in May.

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